An out of service gas pump is seen during the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey on Aug. 30 in Houston, Texas. There's rising fears that Harvey would lead to sharp spikes in gasoline prices. | Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

The Department of Energy said Thursday it will ship crude oil to a Louisiana refinery in a bid to prevent gasoline prices from spiking after Hurricane Harvey left much of the Gulf Coast’s fuel-making capacity paralyzed.

The move by the DOE comes as President Donald Trump has raised expectations this week that Washington would move quickly to address the disaster in Texas, telling an audience in Corpus Christi on Tuesday, “We’re going to get you back and operating immediately.”

The Energy Department’s release from the its Strategic Petroleum Reserve — its first since 2012 — comes amid rising fears that Harvey might cause sharp spikes in gasoline prices as the refineries clustered along the Texas and Louisiana struggled to restart after being pummeled by several feet of rain.

Already, the average retail gas price has climbed 11 cents, to $2.46 a gallon, since last week, but gasoline prices in the futures market have jumped 20 percent since Friday, signaling higher prices at the pump are still to come.

DOE said the release of 500,000 barrels of oil to the Phillips 66 refinery in Westlake, Louisiana, may be followed by more releases as companies restart their plants.

Since last week, Harvey has cut off 20 percent of offshore oil supply and up to 500,000 barrels a day of crude oil production in onshore fields in Texas, and many pipelines have shut down while companies inspect them for damage. That includes the Colonial Pipeline, which supplies gasoline from the Gulf Coast refineries to the East Coast.

Ten refineries in the region with a combined capacity of 3 million barrels a day remain shut, according to the latest DOE information, and two others are operating at a reduced capacity, putting the total reduction in fuel-making capacity at about 17 percent of the nation’s total. Those that remain online may have a hard time sourcing crude oil because of pipeline shutdowns.

On Wednesday, Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) called on Trump to release SPR oil to keep fuel prices from spiking in the wake of Harvey’s damage to the Gulf Coast refining sector.

DOE’s move is a crude exchange — essentially a loan of oil to be repaid later — and will be delivered as 200,000 barrels of sweet crude and 300,000 barrels of sour crude from the SPR site at West Hackberry, Louisiana, Syzmanski said.

Trump’s budget had proposed cutting the SPR down by half from its current 680 million barrels a day.

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